This invention pertains to the recovery of fine particulate matter from liquids, especially precious metals from water.
One by product of jewelry fabrication is water containing flakes of precious metals. Recovery of these flakes has obvious economic advantages. Heretofore, such particulates have been recovered by using a plurality of settling tanks. However, very fine particulates float on the water, resulting in the loss of considerable metal by this process. There have been some attempts to filter these fine particulates, such as pumping water across fine mesh filters. Unfortunately, if the pumping pressure is very high the particulates tend to be forced through the filter, necessitating that an effective system use a mesh sized approximately that of the particles themselves. Such filters would have a mesh size of approximately 1 micron, for too small to permit a flow rate across the filter sufficiently large to make the filtering system commercially viable. Accordingly, it would be advantageous to have an efficient system for extricating these fine particulates at a rate sufficiently high to be commercially viable.